


Cradles

by tolype



Category: Original Work, 約束のネバーランド | Yakusoku no Neverland | The Promised Neverland (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29105505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolype/pseuds/tolype





	Cradles

A single runt of a child on the cusp of his fifteenth birthday outmaneuvers the adults. He outmaneuvers them not totally, but long enough to escape, like a rat. He slips into the icy river and paddles with tenacity. He clings to the underside of the boat and takes frantic breaths through a straw. He only needs to endure this for ten minutes. Five for the boat to undock, five for distance. He carefully avoids the motor. The child’s name is Ansel Benoît.

Ansel Benoît, with numb extremities, lets go after ten minutes and squirms to the riverbank. He’s beyond the walls of the Seaside Auberge now and the hounds will trace him to the docks, so by roll call Grandpapa will send the Family to scout along the river. His first goal: find another water source, one not frosted over.

Later, Mama tells the children a family adopted Ansel. She informs her staff she found the body herself, half-frozen and garlanded by debris and snarling hounds, and sent it off to Grandpapa. She swears the death to secrecy.

“If the children find out, they will despair,” she tells the Brothers and Sisters. Solemnly, the Brothers and Sisters agree. None of them have ever seen Mama so pale, sleepless, and withered.

The Brothers and Sisters wag their tongues amongst themselves. Soon Ansel Benoît becomes a legend among the older children. Through them, his exploits trickle down into the young, fresh minds, and then the youngest, freshest minds. His image distorts into that of a spectre. Finally, Ansel Benoît's spectre is absorbed into the psychic tapestry of the Seaside Auberge.

The Seaside Auberge is an orphanage, founded in 1902. Nestled just before the Alpes-Maritime mountain range, at the edge of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, the orphanage straddles the wilderness of the Sanglotant Moors. Every week, a boat trundles up from Marseilles to Lac d'Esparron, to Lac de St. Croix du Sang, then to the nearby Seaside Auberge, where it docks on the measly harbour. Every couple of months, a government truck carries prospective parents up the seventy-eight miles of St Croix du Sang Road between the Sanglotant Moors and the Alpes-Maritime mountain range. This is among the only physical contact the Seaside Auberge has with the world. While the Mama of the Family supervises with her rod in hand, two men unload ten crates of fresh produce, check the boat for stowaways, and depart. This whole process takes less than an hour, but Ansel devised a way regardless.

Bijou gives the room of six-year-olds a simpering smile. “The Monster of the Moor will come for the very worst child there is. And so, covet these gold stars, darlings.” She jabs the bronze, silver, and gold stars. “If you’re a Silver, he’ll just look at you through your window once in a while. If you’re a Bronze, he’ll slither out from beneath your bed. Only if you’re Gold will he leave you alone.” She unpins her own gold star and holds it out, strategically catching it off the wall lanterns so it gleams.

“It’s alright,” says Aster to the fidgeting children. “If this story happened that long ago, the Man of the Moor will have died of old age a long, long time ago.” He hisses to Bijou, “Don’t scare them like that! They’ll have nightmares their first night here!”

“We have to motivate them to beat our top scores somehow.”

A Brother in his navy uniform emerges from the Family Wing door with a grim smile. “Don’t worry. This used to be a church. St. Croix du Sang. God will protect you as long as you do your daily prayers.”

After dinner—shoyu soup with backfat broth and black beans, and apple brioche for dessert— the twenty-one children turn their seats around to face the raised platform for that month’s performance. Grandpapa always comes to watch. Last time, Pippa, Bunny, and Kang performed Waltz of the Flowers while Charlie, Laurent, and Aster performed Russian Dance. They were all good, but Pippa, only recently demoted to Bronze, excelled; Mama raised her back from a Bronze to a Silver. No wonder—Pippa complained endlessly of her lesser portions of food, increased chores, and decreased privileges. She missed reading books after lights-out, her private en suite, outside play, and the gilded easel she kept on her balcony bestowed to all Golds. When a family adopted her two weeks later, she brought the gilded easel with her.

With her chin held elegantly, Bijou plays Fauré’s Les Berceaux at the theremin while Bunny, hunched over in the shadows and near-invisible behind her thick glasses, accompanies her on the parlor grand piano. Grandpapa sucks his fingers clean and shuts his eyes. He leans his shaggy white head against the walls the Dandelion Ward children scrubbed all day previous in preparation for his visit.

Bunny sings, voice soft, “Le long du Quai, les grands vaisseaux … Que la houle incline en silence … Ne prennent pas garde aux berceaux … Que la main des femmes balance.” 

Grandpapa’s grizzled fingers grip Mama’s knee. “What a treat.”

Mama bows her head. “Bijou chose Sully-Prudhomme’s poem herself. She insisted Bunny sing it in French, not English. I know you’re not a native Frenchman, but in English, it begins something like: along the quay the great ships, bending silently with the surge, take no thought of the cradles rocked by the hands of the women.” 

Under Mama’s instruction, they practiced for weeks, every day from one-thirty to four-thirty. Now Bijou, dark hair in tightly pressed flat ringlets like ribbons and wrapped in a silvery but old dress, dazzles in the dim light of the Seaside Auberge, a ruby-bejeweled fey beauty of fourteen years and every inch a Gold. She has seen Grandpapa’s smile and a smile answers on her cherubic face. As a Silver, Bunny’s voice isn’t perfect, and she fumbles a couple of the notes on the piano, but altogether they seem to please Grandpapa. The new six-year-olds whisper to each other, eyes wide, fixed on Bijou and Bunny.

Aster leans towards them. “You’ll get to pick your skills soon. You can dance, act, paint, write, draw, sing, play an instrument, craft things—there’s endless options, really. If you work really hard, you might even get adopted sooner.” He waves his own gold star badge at them.

The same Brother from earlier says, “That’s only a rumor. There’s no correlation.”

Aster leans away so they can’t hear. “I just wanted to cheer them up.”

After the performance, Grandpapa scribbles on a torn piece of parchment, slips it in a slender envelope, and gives it to Mama. He limps to the front hall to retrieve his coat and leaves.

At nine-thirty, just before lights-out, each child stands in front of their bedroom door as Mama takes a head count.

-

Kang always scolds him. You’re going to get sick.

He opens his door. Sleep-sweat drips from his face. He looks down the dark hall. The dimly lit lantern doesn’t reach all the way to the curved stairs that lead to the second floor, where the Silvers sleep. As he descends to the Silver floor, passes the bedroom doors, and grows accustomed to the dark, he spots one door ajar. A wide eye gazes at him. It belongs to Bennett, one of the new six-year-olds.

“What’re you doing?” Aster whispers.

“I heard something.”

“It’s only me. I want some crackers. I’ll bring you one if you go back to bed.”

On the main floor, Aster leans against the front doors as he pants. He checks the locks like Kang would want him to. Then he fetches crackers from the cupboards and tiptoes all the way back upstairs and down the dark hall. He finds Bennett standing in the center, facing away from him.

Aster touches his frail, buzzed head. Bennett jumps. “Just me again. Here you go.”

“You don’t hear that?”

Aster listens with him. The wind razes the moors around the Seaside Auberge with a ceaseless wail and casts the rain at their windows with a speed and strength that makes it sound like dagger-tips. The abbey’s wood groans as the world assaults it. “We don’t get monsoons very often but don’t worry. It’s normal this time of year.”

He escorts Bennett back down to his room and tucks him into bed. “Look, if you’re ever scared or sick and you want Mama or a Brother or Sister to come, ring this bell by your lantern, alright?”

“I know, I know.”

Aster returns to his room on the top floor, the only one occupied in the boy’s Gold section, passes the door to his private balcony—given only to Gold children—and opens his window slightly. He leans against the wet sill.

This place is like an abandoned lighthouse, Bunny once said. We’re surrounded on all sides by the elements. 

It’s true now more than ever. Moors, rivers, seas, mountains, monsoons—there’s no comfort, warmth, or companionship in any direction except for right here. Even the moon hides behind an endless dark cloud. Aster shuts the window; the wind and rain have unearthed some type of long-dead animal and so the stench quickly grows more intense and unbearable by the second, like the wind is made of it. The weather is so bad that a draft blows through the hollows of the Seaside Auberge and knocks Mama’s crystalline figurine of a cherub off its stand and off Aster’s marble-topped mantle. As Aster places it back on the mantle, he can see his breath.

His rest is fitful; Bennett leaves his room downstairs three times. Each time, the floor outside his room creaks up and down and then pauses, like Bennett is listening. Then he returns downstairs to his room again.

-

After History finishes at nine o’ clock, Aster and Kang follow a mouse from the lesson-room all the way to the entrance hall. It disappears into a crevice at the bottom of the Seaside Auberge entrance, two ornate double-doors.

“That’s that, then.” Kang tucks her apple-red hair behind her ears and gives Aster a grin that stretches her broad, flat nose across her broad, freckled face.

“Nope.” Aster opens the doors. A chilly gust of moist wind slams into their faces. The dark, grey sky looms over the grounds. The ivy draped all over the white pergola that covers the porch drips. The gloomy atmosphere makes even the Seaside Auberge’s garden look dreary and colourless. The violet-and-white oleander shrubs droop. The roses on the arbors and trellises that line the twenty-foot wall separating the Dandelion Ward from the Wayfinder Ward relinquish their petals to the autumn weather. Aster can’t see the mouse.

“Close that, it’s freezing!”

Aster steps outside. “Does it ever bother you?”

Kang follows. She rubs her arms. “What?” Kang’s tone is miserable.

“That we’re hardly ever uncomfortable.”

“No. You think that mouse is gonna die?”

“Dunno.”

Bijou and Bunny, done breakfast clean-up duty, come out and stand beside them. They bring the smell of soap, powdered sugar, and pastry with them. “It won’t,” Bunny says. “It’s a wild mouse. It knows how to live out there.”

Aster gestures to the entrance hall. “But it came from in here. What if it’s its first time outside?”

Bijou shuts her eyes. “It used to be warm here year-round, I read.”

They all stand in the cold doorway in silence. Bunny breaks it first in her soft voice. “Well, there is something that bothers me.” They all look at her. “Pippa hasn’t sent us a letter and it’s been eight days since her adoption.”

Bijou, in the haughty voice of a child who is a year older than her three friends, says, “The world out there is different than this one. This place is insular. I learned that word last night, you know. Insular. It means kept separate and protected. Once you’re adopted, you’re an adult and you deal with adult problems. You’re out there, with the adults—your new family—

and with the war. Even if you wanted to, there’s no time for sending letters to children.”

A Sister approaches them from the Family Ward with a frown on her face.

“I suppose not,” Bunny says with a glance at the Sister. “Close the door before we get in trouble. We aren’t allowed out in this weather.”

As the four traipse away toward the hall that leads to the library, Aster hops from petal to petal on the enormous sapphire fleur-de-lis embedded in the polished marble floor. 

Kang looks at Bijou. “So you wouldn’t send us letters, Bijou?”

“Why should I? This isn’t my real life. My real life begins once I’m adopted. Did you write letters to your stuffed animals after you had to give them away to the young ones?” Bijou laughs.

“No need for letters. I kept one. He passes along my messages. What if you’re not adopted?” Kang asks. “What if you turn seventeen and you have to go to the Wayfinder Ward?”

“I’m not worried about that. Why should I be? I’ve been Gold for three years. Any day now I’ll meet my parents.”

“Have you decided on what you want your adoption gift to be?”

“I want an Ethiopian honeycomb opal necklace.” 

Kang snorts. “What would Mama say about that?”

“They’d definitely do it,” says Bijou.

“I’d ask for a new stuffed rabbit. Velveteen looks shabby now.”

With delight, Bijou squeals, “You’re such a child, Kang!’

From Kang’s expression, Aster doubts she will miss Bijou when Bijou’s gone.

The day Bijou’s new parents come, even the terrible weather doesn’t dampen the dazzle of Bijou’s mood. When Mama and the two adults come into the parlor, Bunny and Bijou embrace each other goodbye. Bijou’s new parents smile at them all. From Aster’s place on the staircase, he almost opens his mouth in grand confusion to ask them about Charlie, who they adopted several years prior, but Bunny’s sudden expression—staring intensely at his face of recognition with her trembling lips parted— stops him. She shakes her head minutely. Aster sways on the steps.

Mama looks from Bunny to him and then turns to help the two adults and Bijou out of the manor. The whole thing lasts less than a second. Aster clutches the railing of the stairs.

Later, he brushes past Kang and her hurt expression to try to find Bunny. She is the only other one at the manor both old enough to remember and present during Charlie’s adoption. Every time he sees her after that, she is always polite and always finds a reason to leave. An animal inside of him, an animal of self-preservation, awakens—it tells him he should not speak of it to anyone, and Aster listens.

-

Kang loops her arm through Aster’s and pulls him away from Bunny and Bijou and into a nook of the library. There, she retrieves her sketchbook out of her faded pink messenger bag.

“I had a dream that I just had to draw.” She sounds excited as she flips to the last page. From an angled bird’s-eye view sits the Seaside Auberge during a stormy autumn sunset in Kang’s expert hand. Aster’s eyes follow the angled, wet slopes of the roof, the black towers for the Golds tapering into detailed spires, the ivy-choked pergola, the gardens, the distant harbour, the rain-dimpled Lac de St. Croix du Sang, the grey-green of the moors, the thick walls plastered with the dying roses, and his own mutedly-coloured grasshopper-legged silhouette in his soaked grey uniform atop the wall facing the vast lake, on the tips of his toes with his tawny arms burst open and up to the sky. As Kang’s pure artistic licence, the rain and wind have tossed his [light?] auburn hair about with a red tinge that doesn’t exist in real life. In a small panel, depicting a close-up of his expression and confirming her further use of artistic license is the reflective seafoam-greenness of his eyes, the stylized beautification of his once-broken nose, and the low pouchiness of his lightly freckled cheeks that makes him look younger and more jubilant than he is.

“Wow! The last thing I dreamed about was a smelly ape trying to use the lantern in my room.” The two giggle. “You should show Mama!”

“Nah. This is just for me.” With a pleased flush to her cheeks, Kang holds her sketchbook against her chest and smiles. The sketchbook presses into her silver star badge. “I want to get a realistic portrait of you before you’re adopted.”

“Anytime! I promise.”

They curl their pinkies around each other.

“You’re really hot—are you catching a fever?”

Aster rolls his eyes. “It’s fine.” 

“Mama,” calls Bunny, who materializes so abruptly at their sides that both Kang and Aster jump. “Doesn’t he look peaky?”

Mama comes over, her electric prod slung against her hip.

“Did you have your balcony doors open again last night?” Kang asks.

As Mama presses a cold hand against Aster’s forehead, Aster says, “No.”

“Everyone’s been getting sick. Take these.” Mama pulls two small silver pills from her pocket. Aster tucks them under his tongue. Later, from his balcony, he spits them down into the gardens.

-

For the next four nights, until at least one o’ clock, Aster sits awake on his sapphire coverlet in the feeble light of his room as the weather rages. He plans, scribbles, and crosses out hasty choreography in his journal for his next performance—Apollo by Balanchine—and nibbles the end of his quill. The force of the storms outside shake the abbey each night; the thunder rattles his window in its frame. The stairs sometimes creak as Bennett ascends and descends them repeatedly, probably too embarrassed or nervous to come to Aster’s door or ring the bell; perhaps he only checks to see if Aster is awake by the light beneath his door and, satisfied, returns to bed. Aster can always tell when Bennett comes, even when the stairs don’t creak and his door is closed, because Bennett’s shadow will absorb the scant light from the floor’s single hall lantern that leaks in beneath Aster’s door. Aster won’t embarrass him, though, so he waits and works. 

Tonight, the rain blows in hard pellets, and the peals of thunder sound like grinding mountains. Lightning strikes every other minute. Even so, when the clock in the hall chimes two-thirty, the wildness outside intensifies. With a sigh Aster puts away his journal. The next blast of thunder spurs a rapid pounding of feet up the stairs. They come crashing down the hall and stop outside his room.

“Come along, Bennett.” Aster opens door, laughing. “It’s alright.”

The hallway is dim and empty. Nimble, scurrying child, Aster thinks, closing his door. Somewhere down the hall, a door slams.

Aster staggers to his balcony. He is feverish; Kang was right after all. We aren’t allowed out in this weather, Bunny said the other day. For a moment, it felt like Bunny and Aster held a parallel understanding.

Does it ever bother you? That we’re hardly ever uncomfortable?

Kang’s dark sea eyes and expression fixed on him, confused, then stout: No.

At the next shattering crack, Aster throws open his balcony doors and steps barefoot onto the terrace, out into the storm. In this tower, he can see beyond the wall to the moors. He rises to the tips of his toes, extends his arms to the angry-bruise sky like Kang’s picture, and opens his mouth wide. The rain coats his tongue and throat and he swallows it. That rotting meat smell still lurks in the air, faint. The wind and noise steal away his enormous shout. Then he laughs until he’s out of breath and lets out another enormous shout.

“I hardly matter! In this, I hardly matter!”

He shuts his eyes. What if the wind carried him off? He unbuttons his shirt and the wind swirls it. What if it carried him over his balcony, over the walls, over the harbour, to the struggling ruins of Marseille, to the ocean and beyond? 

Aster’s grin fades. There’s nowhere it would take him. It would blow him around and around, and he would tumble helplessly in its grasp. There would be no destination, but the surrender—the boundlessness—of it…

The stench increases in a tidal wave. Drenched and cold, Aster steps back into the warmth and meagre light of his room and tries not to gag. He shuts the doors and locks them with a sigh. While the balcony doors were open, rain scattered across the floor. He grabs a towel from his wardrobe and wipes himself off, feet last. His eye catches on bright red streaks that cover the towel. He stares at them and then at his unharmed feet and then at the wet floor. It has massive, thick sliding marks that lead all over his room and around his bed.

Aster crouches and peers beneath his bed. “Bennett! How did you hurt yourself?” Only books and boxes sit in the cold darkness there. The moisture of the rain and the blood slips between the gaps in the wooden slats there. The air shifts; the room becomes icy and frigid; Aster glances up; his wardrobe door has swung open from the wind. He rises to shut it and calls for Bennett again, twisting his neck to look all over his room as he leaps over his bed to the emergency bell attached to the wall. His en-suite door is wide open, but it’s empty. The wall opposite Aster thumps. Aster automatically turns to it. The marble figurine of a fig from the mantle by his door lies shattered on the floor, scuffed and smeared with red.

Physiologically, Aster understands. Increased blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and respiration; constricted blood vessels, constricted pupils; far-flung levels of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine trigger the fight-flight-freeze response. Neurons pew-pew-pew into the corner of the brain responsible for pleasure, panic, and paranoia—the ventral tegmental area—and halt the production of his saliva. Aster understands, and he knows he should not do what he is about to, but his body reacts like a dumb, newborn animal’s body.

Like a puppet, he turns to the mantle, where the fig must have been tossed from, but nothing is there. Fresh puddles form in a path around his—oh, in a fit of zeal, his body realizes—he leaps to the side and spins back to face the emergency bell—too late, he fell exactly into the trap set for him.

It stands there, like Aster’s instincts intuited. The thing raced there after throwing the figurine as a distraction. Stop him from getting back-up, the thing must have thought. It has a grisly pale hand in front of the bell. Aster’s mind, filled with visions of grim spectres and ancient memories of the monster of the moors, quiets at the sight before him of a dirty, bloody kid in a tattered nightgown with long black matted hair obscuring their grimace-twisted face, like a terrorized, horrifying ghost. Blood seeps in thick rivulets, fresh and bright, from the kid’s arm, belly, thigh, and calf.

They stare at one another. Somewhere out in the storm, some moor creature howls, and others soon howl with it. Aster’s eyes flick to the window, to the moors, unthinkingly. No—they’re Grandpapa’s hounds.

That awful hand tightens over the bell.

Hunting, Aster thinks. They were hunting. In a slow, precise movement, Aster turns his back on the kid and goes to his wardrobe. He opens the doors wide so the kid can see exactly what he does. A puddle glistens inside his wardrobe and the rolled up rug is damp; the kid was in there when Aster first fetched a towel. How didn’t he notice? Aster pulls more towels from the wardrobe and tosses them at his bed. Then he pulls out his costume-making tin and a basic medical kit with bandages, disinfectant, thread, and needle. When he turns back around, hands full, the kid hasn’t moved.

Aster pries the lids off and pushes them to the kid’s feet. “I’m going to use what’s in there and treat you. Well, hopefully. First, follow the tassel into the base of the bell push. Use the needle in the tin to cut it. I won’t be able to get my fingers in to ring it.” Without looking away from Aster, the kid grips the needle in one hand but uses their fingernails to cut the ribbon. Then the kid seizes a towel. Aster shuffles forward on his knees and bends low, neck exposed, to show he’s harmless and vulnerable. The kid makes a serpentine hiss when Aster goes to pick up the sharper threading needle.

“I need that to sew you. Hold the other one to my eyeball or something.”

“No,” says the kid in a hoarse, low voice. He drops the dull needle and takes the sharp one.

“It’ll hurt more.”

The kid doesn’t answer. He only wields the needle in a tense hand.

No more adrenaline, Aster thinks. I’m perfectly calm now. He swabs and cleans the bloody, bitten calf and readies his tools. He should start at the profusely bleeding thigh, but he wants to build trust first. He’ll have to be quick. “This is going to hurt.”

The kid doesn’t react to the dull needle. “You’ve never done this before?”

“Well, no. Of course not.”

A few minutes pass. The kid’s breaths come rapid and weak and his limbs tremble from strain.

Aster tightly bandages the quivering, bloodless calf. “I’m doing your thigh now. Sit down before you pass out.”

“Yes, your Majesty.” The haughtiness matches Bijou’s. The kid collapses onto the bedside table, partially on Aster’s journal. His fist goes slack; the needle tips a bit, but he’s still awake. From this angle, Aster can see streaks of white in the kid’s hair. Malnutrition or stress can cause that, but…

Aster goes to his en-suite and soaks a couple towels in hot water. He returns to his knees and rethreads the needle. “You’re too young to be from the Wayfinder Ward, but you’re not from here. What part of the Seaside Auberge are you from?”

“The less you know, the better, your Majesty.”

“Cut that out. My name is Aster.”

“You do live in a tower of a castle like royalty, though.”

“People are born into royalty. I worked hard to get to Gold.”

“Worked hard, did you? How audacious of someone with no scars, blisters, or calluses anywhere on them to say. Besides, you couldn’t keep a secret to save your life. It’s written all over your face.” 

Aster laughs. “You can keep being rude if it’s helping you stay conscious. What’s your name?”

“What kind of a freak smiles in a situation like this? Maybe I was safer out there.”

When they finish, Aster tells him to wash his hair in the en-suite and find something to wear from his wardrobe while he gets food from the kitchen.

“I can’t let you leave.”

“There’s another push bell behind the towel rack in the en-suite that I could’ve rang when I went in there, but I didn’t. I also had scissors in my pocket this whole time.” Aster tosses the scissors onto his bed. “Just wash up. I’ll be back.”

Aster creeps downstairs. The house is silent, dark, and cold. Outside the frosted glass paired with the entrance hall doors, blurry trees twist and bend in the onslaught. The draft in the house carries the stench of rotting meat from outside. The storms must have unearthed a whole trove of dead animals. With a tray of black tea, hot onion soup, raw shrimp-salmon quiche, warmed butter-brioche, and raspberry jam, Aster returns to his room without incident and places the tray on his bed. He jumps when the door closes behind him.

“You are a scoundrel for following me about! What if someone heard you? And what should I call you?”

“Over your thunderous, bumbling footsteps? Not likely.” He sniffs the tray like a dog and devours the raw shrimp-salmon quiche with dirty fingers first.

Aster pulls the tray back. “Your name.”

The kid sets his spoon down with a scowl. “You’re rather a manipulative bully. It’s— Marcel.” With his hair washed, Marcel’s wan, pale face seems much less the ghastly terror that Aster first met.

Aster slides the tray back to Marcel and sits on the corner of his coverlet and scrawls notes in the margin of his journal. Eventually, the clock strikes four o’ clock.

“Thanks for the help, your Highness.”

Aster pushes him. They have a brief tussle. Marcel wins easily even though he’s much slighter than Aster. “You looked like a sad little ghost, peasant—what was I supposed to do?”

“You’re gonna get in trouble.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe even exiled from your throne.”

“Yeah.”

“Airhead. Tell them I threatened you but say nothing else after; I bet you’re a terrible liar.”

“Where are you gonna go?”

“A spoiled little princeling would spill that secret at the first spank of his bottom.”

“I only want you to be safe; I might be able to help!”

Marcel turns and regards Aster with a wide and unconcealed expression that radiates shock and disgust. “Why?”

“Why? I never thought. I guess because—well—we’re the same.”

“You are a prince of privileged delusion, parading about in fairyland!”

“We’re the same!” One is less pompous than the other, though.

“No.” Marcel’s hands grip Aster’s shoulders painfully. “Listen to yourself. I knew you Gold ones wouldn’t be—but this—the arrogance and the naivete of the home-grown, the tamed, the subjugated—you don’t know anything in the world.”

“You don’t know anything about me, you pretentious ass.”

“Yes, I do.” Marcel digs his fingers into the Aster’s sides, his chest, his arms, his neck until Aster slaps him away. “Soft, soft, soft. No taint of peril, raised precisely and herded quite happily towards one purpose and one purpose only.”

“Stop it.”

In a softer, almost tender voice, Marcel whispers, “You’re meat. You’re just meat that talks and parrots things it read in the books its masters made it read. You’re meat that grew up on a golden platter, babied and coddled and stuffed, stuffed, stuffed. ‘We’re the same’? We are not. You’re hardly a real person. You're hardly a shadow. All of you.”

For a long time, Aster stays silent because he knows his voice will break if he tries to speak. Absurdly, his eyes ache and swim. Marcel is watching him, so he turns his face away.

“Why should I care what a stranger thinks of me?” Aster says at last.

“Exactly. We’re strangers. Don’t concern yourself with the fate of strangers. Frivolous attachments are nothing but shackles.” Marcel smiles at Aster then, his face suddenly plum-sweet and guileless.

Aster shrinks from Marcel and occupies himself with cleaning the floor. “You’re wrong. Attachments are what make us strong. Attachments make life worth living.”

“Bold words from one who has never suffered a single hardship.”

“That’s what it is!” And Aster is grinning. “You’ve had hardships, then. Hardships that made you believe attachments are dangerous.”

“Stop grinning like that. You look insane.”

“Nobody grows up craving isolation. Nobody. Something has to happen to change a person like that.”

“Until you’ve had to claw your way to survival, you have no authority to speak on—morals or human nature in dire straits. You simply cannot understand what it means to fight every day. Your arrogant, baseless idealism makes me want to leap out the window.”

Still smiling, Aster says, “It’s better to fight together.”

“God, won’t one of my pursuers please come tear my throat out?”

“You’ll see. You have a friend in me, now. There’s no need to be alone.”

“They’ve raised some very trusting, airheaded lambs here. After I leave here forever, I’ll every so often think of that idiot prince I met once who took in a stranger.”

“For some reason, I doubt that very much.”

Irritably, Marcel snaps, “Doubt what?”

“That this will be our only meeting.” This is true lunacy, true discomfort, true reality, Aster thinks, this is reality baring to me a fraction of its true, terrible face, and I’ve never, ever been happier in my life. Aster finds himself humming as he scrubs rain and congealed blood from his floors. 

“Are all the caged birds here a few short of a flock or is it just you?”

Aster looks up to find Marcel staring at him with the same expression as earlier. He looks almost frightened. Aster smiles. “Who knows?”

“How long have you been a Gold?”

“As long as I can remember.”

“And you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Then you go willingly to your slaughter and you deserve to be butchered.”

“How maudlin of you. What do you mean?”

“Open your damn eyes. I refuse to do your work or you. I’ll say this: hurry up, because after tonight you won’t have much time left. Not you, nor your little closest friends—”

Aster, on a whim, touches Marcel’s white tuft of hair. It shocks Marcel into a violent flinch and then silence. “Get some sleep. You’ll need your strength in the days that come. And do write a letter someday.”

Aster finishes cleaning by the time the birds first start to stir. He stuffs the bloody towels inside the rolled-up rug in his wardrobe. He’ll dispose of them privately somehow. On the bed, Marcel lies still as a corpse, asleep and with a feverish temperature, palms open and fingers lax. At least it’s a Free Day, Aster thinks, as he slips into the bed. I can sleep as long as I want.

In the morning, Marcel is gone, along with the sharp needle, the roll of thread, the disinfectant, the borrowed outfit, and several blank pages torn from his journal. Aster wakes to the snarls of Grandpapa’s hounds and Mama’s white lips and knuckles.

“My life was in danger,” Aster says as Mama runs her fingers along her rod. Marcel was right. Aster can’t lie—he never needed to before.

“What did he say to you?”

“He refused to talk to me.” And somehow, Aster keeps saying this through the pain until Mama is satisfied he speaks the truth. Afterward, as Mama washes Aster’s blazing, striped back, Aster says, “He looked small and scared. I thought he would die.”

“A grave lack of judgement, my sweet Aster.” Without looking, Aster knows Mama is crying.

No, Mama. I’ve made my first ever real choice. I don’t regret it.

Even when Marcel’s dark ferocious eyes and gentle voice clashed with his cold words. Meat, he said. You’re just meat.

Stop grinning like that, you look insane.

Aster can’t help it. I’ve been shown the true, terrible face of reality—and I’ve never been happier.

Even when Marcel denied him.

Let me come with you.

No. Your bumbling steps and privileged, princely upbringing would get me killed. I’d rather my throat get torn out. My lord, what a child; don’t cry! If you can keep a secret, maybe I’ll leave you a breadcrumb.

Kang will write to Aster long after he is adopted.

Aster discovers, as he moves his belongings from the Gold section to the Bronze section in the basement, the bloody towels stuffed inside the rug missing as well. A torn page from his journal sits crumpled inside.

Airhead, it says.

-

After four years, Aster is accustomed to his Bronze status. He doesn’t mind the hard bread or the scant free time. The only mild annoyance, at first, were the mice scratching from the inside of the shuttered vent in his room. He solved the problem by pushing the wardrobe in front of it to block the noise. In fact, he feels he got off easy somehow. Brothers and Sisters don’t seem to notice him as much. He often takes to the upper veranda in the library, sits on a pile of books, and looks out the blurry window to watch the endless nothingness of the moors. From this height, this place really is like an abandoned lighthouse.

The only thing Aster misses about his Gold status is the balcony. He still has a window in his tiny basement room, though. He opens it now and stretches his arm out until his fingertips touch the wet rusted bars secured on the outside. The cold rain splashes against them. From this position, this place is more like a birdcage. He feels like a bird, in any case. He’s a bird that sang only once, during that monsoon four years ago, and the music has been swelling, tumultuous, in his chest all this time. Any moment it will burst. Any moment. That’s what it feels like.

“When you talk like that I worry about you,” Kang says after Aster relates some of this. “Like you're drugged or something.” She grips Aster’s hand in hers as they walk side-by-side down the hall to the library. Bunny walks with them, her nose in a book.

Nearby Laurent and Charlie come the opposite way.

“Just saw Mom in the gardens,” Charlie is saying to Laurent. Bunny glances over.

“Dreary,” Laurent says.

“Mama’s been in the kitchens all day,” Kang tells them. They ignore her. 

Aster says, “I do feel like I’ve been going a bit mad, bit by bit. I feel—restless. Like a bird fluttering about before the time for migration, before winter comes. Oh, I don’t—Bennett, what are you doing?”

Bennett, half-sheathed in a vent in the wall right next to the library entrance with the grate discarded on the floor next to him, only wiggles in further. Aster and Kang both seize his legs and pull him out.

“There’s this awful smell all over the house and I swear it comes from there, and it keeps twisting my dreams when I’m asleep. I have to see what it is!”

At this, Bunny shuts her book and frowns at Bennett.

“You’ll never make it to Silver if you keep doing things like this, Bennett,” Kang says crossly. She roughly wipes the dust from him. Aster leans into the vent and inhales. There is a scent, yes, like rotting meat.

“That always comes this time of year. I think the windstorms unearth dead animals. The rain might drown the mice in the walls, too.”

“I don’t smell anything at all,” says Kang. 

“What’s this racket for?” asks a Brother coming from the hallway.

“Bennett lost one of his best marbles down there,” says Bunny. “We were trying to get it back for him.”

The Brother sighs. “That vent goes straight down. Down, down, down. After we restructured the place, we closed off whole sections. It’s inaccessible. Your toy is lost. Bennett, you must be more careful. Besides, you should be focusing on your performance this week. Don’t you care to become a Silver?”

“Sorry,” Bennett mumbles. Fat tears leak from his eyes—a daily occurrence.

As the four turn into the library, they nearly bump into a Sister.

“Why’d you lie, Bunny?” Aster asks.

Bunny’s eyes are wide, almost all white. Her voice comes out a bit shrill. “Lie? About what?”

“You’ve been funny since Bijou was adopted. She really hasn’t written, has she?”

Bunny puts her hands in front of her face. “No!”

“She meant it, then? That little speech about leaving us behind?” Aster scowls. He helps Bennett up onto the window ledge. “How can you spend a meaningful amount of time with someone and then behave like it never existed?”

“I’ve done a terrible thing,” Bunny whispers behind her hands. “An awful, awful thing.”

“What is it, Bunny?”

“It’s terrible—terrible—”

Bennett squalls and slaps his palms against the window. Aster hushes him.

“Out with it, Bunny.” Kang’s tone is sharp.

“Mama asked me—she asked me who I thought deserved a family the most—”

“That’s not a bad thing. I’m sure Bijou appreciates the recommendation.”

“Not Bijou! Not Bijou!” Bunny dissolves into tears. Kang and Bunny have a soft, whispered conversation that Aster can’t hear.

Bennett slams on the window and Aster pulls him away. Bennett gibbers wildly and moans, “Do you see it? Do you see it in the gardens?” Aster can hardly see anything because of the dark of the weather and the blurred glass. Aster touches his forehead; Bennett has an awful fever.

“Bunny,” says the Sister from before. “A word, please.”

Aster pulls Bennett over. “Sister, I think Bennett needs to see the nurse.”

With a grave expression, the Sister lifts Bennett into her arms. “You ought to rest, too, Aster. You look a bit peaky. You want to be in top form this week for Grandpapa.”

“I’ll make sure he does,” says Kang.

Bennett twists in the Sister’s arms as the trio disappears down the hall. His slurred screeches ring out. “It’s so black and big—lurching—up and down the halls—smells so awful—stands by my bed all night long—”

-

Two hours before the performance, Aster tries to rest. Instead he kicks all the sheets off and stuffs them beneath his bed. The draft coming from the loose slats there maddens him. What luck he has to have two bedrooms with the same problem. 

The performance goes well. Bennett makes most of his leaps and remembers most of his moves. Aster glides around the platform on autopilot, sated on four plates of salmon belly sashimi. I’m not a bird in a birdcage, he thinks, I’m a dancing monkey at a circus. Why couldn’t I love it, like Bijou? She belonged on the stage. She lived to dazzle a crowd. How many has she dazzled in the six months since her adoption?

Grandpapa slips an envelope to Mama and winks at Aster.

That night, Kang shows up at his door. Since Bronze doors are kept locked from the outside, she unlocks it and slips in.

“Why do I feel like you’re going away soon?” Her face is puffy and blotchy.

“I feel the same way.”

Kang lies down on his bed with him. “You’re burning up.”

“I hope I burn up into ash. Open the window, will you? I want the wind to take me away when that happens.”

Kang is crying. “Aster. I wish you didn’t have to go. Promise me. Promise you’ll write.”

“I promise,” he slurs. He tries to grab her hand. She helps him do it.

He doesn’t feel like he’s burning up. The room down here is always cool. He wants more salmon belly. Kang falls asleep beside him and Aster watches their breaths disappear into the air. With a start, he realizes he lost consciousness. Time has passed. The moon has traveled halfway across the sky. The window is still open. Kang is long gone; the sheets are cold. Mama would spit if she caught her in Aster’s room. He tries his door. Kang didn’t relock it.

That stench is back; it probably woke him. Or maybe the wind did; he recalls the sound of it caressing the grass by his window and flipping the pages of his journal. Aster sits gingerly and gazes at the rumpled sheets. The stench intensifies and he knows he won’t be able to sleep, so he fetches his journal from the barred windowsill where he always keeps it. The weather chills the material, and it cools his dry, hot skin. He’ll leave her a letter right away. He dips the quill into the ink.

This will be the first of many, he writes. Then he freezes. In the margins lurks an old torn paper from his journal scrawled in his own ink, not yet dry. It says: RIGHT NOW.

Aster’s heart comes ferociously alive in his chest. The quill falls from his hands. Ink blots the page and his hands. So he really is still alive—he still walks the Earth! He dashes to the windowsill. He can’t see much, being below ground level. There’s a needle-like thing resting there that, in his dazed, ill state, he somehow missed. It seems like a tool, some kind of screwdriver. Part of it feels warm, recently held perhaps—

That stench is maddening!

He feels around the bars of his window. The tool doesn’t fit anywhere. Then, as if possessed by some sort of calm animal, his head turns to his wardrobe, to the place he pushed it to cover the shuttered vent.

Aster works deliberately, slowly, at moving the wardrobe. He pauses at every creak, every groan. If Mama came now—if Mama caught him doing this—he can see her face in his mind turn white-lipped and bulge-eyed. By the time he drops to his knees before the vent, Aster sweats profusely. 

The screwdriver fits, an absurd, impossible miracle. Aster stares at it, for a long moment. Where am I going? What am I doing? What on Earth am I doing?

He leaves a crumpled note for Kang in the pocket of his spare uniform. Somehow, he knows she will take the sweater before anybody else gets to it.

He makes short work of the vent. Aster worms his way in backwards then pulls the wardrobe flush against the wall. In the dark, Aster fumbles as he re-shutters the vent. Inside, every noise is amplified until his ears ring. He is trapped on every side, trapped on his belly, wriggling his way backwards and backwards and backwards. The tight space rolls his pant legs up, baring his flesh to dust and spiders and mice.

Bennett was wrong. The stench doesn’t come from these vents. It grows fainter and fainter the farther Aster gets from his room.

The vent ends abruptly; Aster falls a distance of about ten feet and lands hard on his belly. His chin bounces off hard stone; for a while, all Aster can do is lie there and gasp for breath, the wind utterly knocked out of him. He’s totally blind; the pitch black darkness presses in from every direction. Shakily, Aster gropes around for the screwdriver. When he finds it, he stands up. Something brushes his ear and he yelps. It’s a mouse—a bold one. It sits on his shoulder and chirrups, then leaps away.

Aster whispers into the dark, “Let’s keep each other company, little mouse. In fact, show me the way!” He follows the scurry of its movements down some kind of cold, damp passage which smells like earth. Aster’s abused belly growls. Absurdly, thoughts of salmon belly fill his mind. “Have you got any sashimi, little mouse?” And he giggles. “I should’ve really brought water with me. I’m far too ill to abandon my life empty-handed.”

He chatters mindlessly as he staggers and stumbles down the passage. It’s five times the length of the Seaside Auberge’s grounds. It twists, turns, and has sudden ledges, drafts blowing from unreachable places; Aster falls more than once. And more than once, Aster breaks into a run at a wet snarl that comes from way too close.

Finally, Aster bumps into a hard, uneven stone wall. He feels all around for some kind of opening. Breathy, panicked laughter escapes him as he finds nothing.

“My lord! Does my rabbit hole really end here?”

He paces the room, feeling all along the stones. Then his lungs contract rapidly and his head swims and this is it, this is really it, how long have I wandered down here? I’m going to become bones here. Aster stops. A voice in his head mocks him.

Poor little princeling. Your first real trial and you’ve gone and lost your head. How spoiled.

“Now, I’ll do this as well as anybody. We’re the same after all—that’s my resolve.” And Aster stands still and takes deep breaths. Then he feels it—a draft, a stream of wind, a subtle guide. He follows it to one corner, then removes his socks and climbs the stones, and there—no stones and a tight squeeze. Aster has to hold his breath and contract his ribs and contort slightly to get through, and it’s endless, endless, unbearably long, his body hurts—God, if I breathe I will get stuck, and then I will really become bones here! Why do I want to laugh?—then, finally, the wind bites at his face and he’s squirming out onto a cold bed of dirt and dry grass and a vast unknown. The stars in the night sky blink down at him, somewhat churlishly. Aster rolls onto his back and breathes and breathes. A mouse chirrups nearby.

“I’ve really gone and done it now, little mouse.” He lies there for a long time. The wind brings a whiff of that stench. Now, it makes Aster smile. “I wonder what Bennett is doing. Is he wandering the halls right now—drifting from room to room like a ghost?”

Somebody nearby laughs scornfully.

“A smile! You’re unbelievable. The audacity to daydream in a situation like this!” In dark clothes and a hood, Marcel stands over him with his hands on his hips and a small smile on his face. The smile fades as Aster gapes at him. “You’re much worse off than I thought. I thought maybe you talked so brainlessly because that’s your personality, but you’re near delirium, aren’t you?”

“You were with me—with me from the beginning—what about when those wild dogs were chasing me? I was nearly seriously injured!”

Marcel abruptly leans down and yanks Aster upright and pushes a cold bottle against his mouth. “Drink more. More! I had my fun but you’re in a bad way. Now listen. I won’t ever forfeit my life for someone else, especially not some spoiled rotten half-wit lamb like you stumbling hopelessly about. You hear me?” Marcel wrenches Aster to his feet once the bottle of sweet-smelling water is finished and keeps a brutal pace. “From now on, fight tooth and claw for your own survival.”

“I don’t have claws or fangs.”

Marcel laughs. “Not yet, but you will.” His tone curdles once more. “For now, you did well by running away. Save yourself, fight for yourself; no one will come to rescue you after tonight. After tonight, you must keep up or you will be left behind. Hear me?”

Aster almost smiles. You haughty prick.

They travel across the moors for at least another hour. Sometimes, Marcel shifts their direction suddenly and rapidly increases their gait; it always depends on the direction of the wind. A cold, creeping feeling in Aster’s gut blooms into the knowledge that they are avoiding detection from predators.

“It’s that stench, isn’t it?” Aster asks Marcel.

“When you smell that, you run in the opposite direction, got it? Don’t wait, don’t freeze, just run. Never look. They don’t like to be seen.”

Marcel slips into a crevice in the ground by some rocks and Aster, limbs clumsy with fever, follows him. Marcel blocks the entrance with an enormous stone. After squirming and squeezing through the tight fit, downwards, downwards, the passage opens into an abandoned mine shaft with a cart on the tracks.

“Your chariot awaits you, your Majesty.” 

The cart trundles down the track and gains speed. The passage widens incredibly into a cavernous chamber. Marcel tips more flowery-smelling liquid toward Aster’s mouth. “I only have rosewater. I’m out of Altoids.” Aster guzzles the rosewater to get the stench out of his mouth and nose. “I know. They smell like melted corpse in a summer pond.”

Aster’s head lolls back. The mine cart races across a bridge over a vast underground freshwater reservoir. The aquamarine bioluminescence of the algae adorning the crystal-mineral deposits and the stalactites glitters. It’s like another night sky, a private one, just for the two of them. Moisture drips from their tips and onto Aster’s face. He closes his eyes, ravenous for salmon belly.

“Wake up. You need to swallow this.”

“Wh’sit?”

“Medicine.” Aster struggles. Marcel jostles him. “It’s not the barbitone stuff they’ve been using on you. It’s something else. Really. You already drank what I gave you. I could’ve put anything in that, so stop putting up a fight. You’re weak as a kitten. Now—take this all at once and swallow immediately. You must swallow immediately.” Within the liquid, a smooth, soft thing also slides down Aster’s throat. “It’s raw coconut frog and exactly what you need.”

When the cart stops, Marcel and Aster continue along the passage. They climb up a dirt wall and squirm into an opening. As Marcel pushes stones in front of the narrow gaps they entered from, Aster takes in the warm, circular room, with a fireplace and lanterns and a red rug and red couch and red bed and piles and piles of books. He sees a thick black kettle, and scratched silverware, and plates, and bowls, and cups, and a moderately-sized blue cooler. He sees an abacus and a chessboard and a corner with five potted green peppers. At the end of the room, Aster finds a modern door and a blue-tiled, basic bathroom covered in twisted, leaking pipes behind it. When he turns back around, Marcel is watching him with his eyebrows up.

“Fit for royalty, your Majesty?”

“Is this where you’ve been living?”

Marcel clicks his tongue and turns away. “Not everyone gets gleaming marble floors and foie gras at seven o’ clock precisely.”

Aster grabs Marcel’s arm. “It’s better than anything I’ve ever seen!”

“Well, welcome, exalted sir, to Chalet Crépuscule. Our very own Twilight Cottage.”

“A bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, I—it’s not like I named it that!”

“Who named it?”

“Why, your ‘Monster of the Moors’, of course. Get used to living in the flickers of candlelight. Now our lives dwell solely behind the boundaries of dawn.”

Aster, in a jittery eagerness, washes up, rummages in the leaning wardrobe for clean clothes, changes, and lies on the large, squashy couch. Marcel’s footsteps are quiet as he moves around the room. Those footsteps, moving carefully, familiarly, in this very room, circular and tall and beige-red-warm. An enormous feeling swells inside him. Faintly, the water in the reservoir laps, and with those footsteps in this room—these are the sweetest sounds he’s heard in his life. This is it—now this is really it.

“I was right, you know,” Aster says. Marcel makes a questioning noise. “I was right that we weren’t only going to meet once.”

The kettle boils. “What a nuisance,” Marcel says finally.

“You need to tell me everything now.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what’s wrong with the Seaside Auberge.”

Aster feels Marcel’s shadow fall over him. He opens his eyes. 

Marcel’s face is frozen, mouth open, a dent in his brow. “What do you think is wrong with it? You haven’t figured it out? Why the devil did you escape from it? Are you saying you came without even knowing?”

“I thought you were going to tell me. You’re the one that kept an eye on me.”

“Now, don’t get it mixed up—”

“I think they’re selling us. I think every month when Grandpapa watches our performances, he decides who, if any, is high quality enough to sell next. It’s almost always a Gold. Golds must have some value alive—otherwise they wouldn’t bother having us master any skills at all—so they aren’t killed, at least not immediately. I suspect Silvers and Bronzes are sold to more disagreeable buyers. I also suspect I was one of three potential candidates for ‘adoption’ this time, the other two being Bennett and Bunny. Bunny knew something, and in fact I think she knew something for a very long time. Their control of Bennett lapsed frequently. And I think they… I think something even more terrible is going on, Marcel.”

“Yes. There is.” Marcel kneels by his side and spoons honey into his tea. He makes Aster swallow another raw coconut frog. “And? What of your little girlfriend?”

“I think … something is in me, Bennett, and Bunny that’s not in Kang. We can sense things she can’t. She’s—they are all—in unimaginable danger. You were right, Marcel. I don’t know anything in the world.”

“Then I have a gift for you. Your very first knowledge.” Marcel scribbles on a piece of paper. Aster holds it up. It says ‘Przemyslaw Milosz Ksawery’. “That’s your real name.” He pronounces it for Aster. “I had a look around the king’s castle that night.”

“I’ve always been ‘Aster’,” says Aster. “That name doesn’t feel like me.”

“It’s the name you were given by your real Mama and Papa. The Queen and the King.”

“Is Marcel your real name?” Marcel stares, clearly taken aback. Aster sits up and grasps Marcel’s sleeve. “I knew it! You lied! Tell me yours!”

“Really, you are a nuisance!”

“I don’t consider you a stranger. I consider you paramount, from the moment you blazed onto my balcony. That’s an irrevocable conclusion.” Marcel stares in baffled amazement, shoulders slumping, mouth slightly open. “Tell me yours!”

Marcel’s face inches shut. “No.”

“Why?”

“We’re strangers. We will continue to be strangers. We will part as strangers.”

Aster smiles. “Well, I got what I expected to get, so thank you and goodnight!”

“Now, hold on—what the devil do you mean?”

“I knew that if Marcel wasn’t your real name you wouldn’t want to give the real one up to me easily. See, I’ve an idea of how you think of me. So I aimed only to confirm that Marcel wasn’t your name and I have.”

“Not only a princeling, but a snake and a weasel?”

“Yes. Now, please give me another of those raw frogs.”

Marcel does so. Then Marcel says, “You’ve an idea of how I think of you and I’ve an idea of how you think of me. I haven’t hid my disgust for your upbringing. You speak of your upbringing with nostalgia and fondness. You intend, at some point, to return.” When Aster denies this, Marcel says, “Maybe you don’t know it yet, but it’s germinating in the shadows of your heart. You’ll return to what I see as the incarnation of pure evil. You’ll try to forgive it, or reform it, when it should only be destroyed. That’s the flimsy, empty character they’ve given you; one of arrogant untested noble ideals that lead only to ruin. Our goals, our lives, our hearts run parallel to one another; they can’t ever be united. So why should I give my real name to my enemy?”

Aster turns away from Marcel, taut and coiled. His eyes burn and burn. “I really have never wanted anything more than to just stay here, in this room.”

“That’s been your only desire in your entire life, Przemyslaw. You passively drift into the nearest whirlpool and call it your home. That’s why the East Side Company is evil. They raise human husks who lack the strength of a soul. They even call you ‘Organics’. And you—you’re their ideal manifestation.”

Meat, Aster remembers in Marcel’s young, clear voice. You’re just meat.

Aster cups his shoulders so they won’t shake. I shouldn’t have come here. I should have kept my eyes closed. I should have become bones. I should have kept taking the barbiturates Mama thought she gave me so sneakily. There is nothing worse on Earth than this feeling right now.

I want to go back—back to when he didn’t strike me across the heart with who I really am, when the water and his footsteps sounded like home. Back to days in the garden with Kang.

It takes Aster several minutes to realize Marcel is smoothing his hands up and down Aster’s quivering arms.

“Hey—hey—hey—” Marcel’s saying in a soft voice, and he sounds like he did four years ago, young and uncertain and critically injured in many awful ways. “Look at me. Look at me. Hey.” Aster lets Marcel pull his wet face from the cushions. “I’m sorry. Look at me.” Marcel’s expression is troubled and serious. “I hurt your feelings and I apologize. Sincerely.”

“I’m not even a real person to you.”

“Listen to me. I was wrong to say that. After all this time, I somehow forgot how—I survive. My whole life, I’ve survived after I escaped. To justify what I’ve—I can’t afford to see anybody as real. Thinking like that will get me killed. If my enemy is a real person—a real person with a soul—I’ll hesitate and it will kill me. I’m sorry I put you in that crossfire. I haven’t dealt with another person’s tears in a long time. You hear me? I don’t want to hurt you.”

Aster back turns over. “Well, you’ve taken in a stray. It’s your duty to fulfill ‘til the end. What enemies are those, anyway?”

Marcel watches him but doesn’t respond.

“You know,” says Aster. “I think it’s too late for me to get into that sort of raw meat thing. My stomach couldn’t handle it, or I’d get some kind of disease…”

“If you die, I’ll make good use of you.”

“Disgusting.” Aster plucks a dusty tome from the debris on the grotto’s floor next to the couch.

Marcel leans over him. “‘Humans are shapeshifters; there’s naught that’s not in this world’.”

“Huh?”

Marcel smiles. It’s sharp like a razorblade. “Because human nature can shapeshift, anything goes. Ihara Saikaku. That’s ‘Saikaku’s Tales from Various Provinces’.”

“You’re a well-read monster, is that it?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Without books, the last vestiges of my sanity would have been eclipsed by everything I had to do to survive.”

“Was becoming pompous one of those things? You talk like a villain in fairytales.”

“Hmph.”

“‘Fennec’ might suit you, if Marcel does not,” Aster says.

Marcel clicks his tongue. “It would not suit me.”

“Sure it did. I bet as a child those ears heard everything.”

Marcel touches his very normal ears with a surprisingly self-conscious frown. “I was never a child. I sprouted fully formed.”

“You aren’t funny.”

“The line means that because the nature of human beings is subject to change, anything can happen. We are capable of anything.”

“You’re doing this with me, saving them. What point is there in only living for one’s self?”

“You survive in their memory. You’re such a child.”

For a moment, Bijou’s delighted face and Kang’s disgruntled face fly through his mind. Their faces leaves an ache in his chest. “You’re doing this, Marcel! Swear it.”

Darkly, Marcel says, “‘He’s a millstone ‘round my neck’. He’ll take me to the bottom with him’.”

“John Donne.”

“The princeling has been well-read in my absence.”

“Comparing me to a millstone?”

“My hamartia. You know, I’m not used to having to articulate myself.”

“That’s sad.” Aster closes his eyes. “We have lots of work to do.”

“Focus on getting better. You escaped once—good work. But you got the sickness from that place and it has followed you and festered inside. Survive that first, survive the urges that come with it, the ones that become ever more and more violent, and then we will talk about the madness of returning for your little friends, if they’re even still alive. And if they are, you may end up damning them.”

Aster eats another coconut frog and insists, “We’re going to save them.”

“As you wish.”

With a small, sad, faraway thing in his downcast eyes, Marcel puts out the light.


End file.
